Summary

Grasshopper is Doig’s third print portfolio, following Ten Etchings 1996 (Tate P11471-P11480) and Blizzard ’77 1997 (Tate P11554-P11561). It was produced in an edition of thirty-five. Tate’s copy is one of seven additional proof sets. Each print is individually signed and numbered ‘TC’ (Tate copy) by the artist. The portfolio is presented in a pale yellow, hinged solander box bearing the artist’s name in dark brown. The title and colophon pages were designed by Peter B. Willberg and printed in dark green. The contents were printed at Hope Sufferance Press, London on 350gsm Zerkall paper and published by Charles Booth-Clibborn under his imprint, The Paragon Press. Colour etching involves a layering process sympathetic to Doig’s painting process of building up colours and image in many stages. The prints in Grasshopper were created using between one and three plates and a range of etching techniques. Variety in texture and tone was created with aquatint (a process for creating an even tonal field), open bite (a method in which unprotected areas of the plate are exposed to acid to produce a very light tone), deep bite (a process which results in very dark tones), spit bite (a method involving painting or splashing acid onto the plate resulting in painterly effects) and sugarlift (a process which allows the artist to paint marks that print rather than having to outline them negatively). The individual prints were originally untitled, but were titled by the artist on publication of Contemporary British Art in Print: The Publications of Charles Booth-Clibborn and his Imprint The Paragon Press 1995-2000 in 2001.

The title Grasshopper is associated, for Doig, with lines found in a book on the history of ice hockey (a sport the artist enjoys from his adolescence spent in rural Canada). A farmer settling in the northern American prairies in the nineteenth century is quoted as having remarked: ‘Man is a grasshopper here, a mere insect making way between the enormous discs of heaven and earth’ (Contemporary British Art in Print, p.313). The portfolio shares its title with a painting created in 1990 (Saatchi Collection, London) depicting a vast landscape seen from the perspective of an insect. For early settlers on the northern American continent, the conquest of nature (or at least its partial taming) was of prime importance and the landscape has a power and significance largely lost in densely populated and more ancient Europe. It represents potential for both sublime beauty and the horror of death, decay and obliteration. The tension between these two has been a recurring theme in Doig’s paintings since the early 1990s. The prints in Grasshopper
are dominated by black and as a result are far darker than Doig’s previous imagery. This heightens the sense of danger suggested in the human relationship with the landscape.

Canoe Lake portrays an image used repeatedly by the artist. It is a figure in a canoe on a lake, drifting idly, one arm hanging over the side of the canoe, the hand trailing the water. This image is derived from a still photograph Doig took from a video of the cult horror film Friday the 13th (1980, director Sean S. Cunningham). His painting Echo Lake 1998 (Tate T07467) is also based on a still from this film. Several versions of the image represented in the etching exist in various media and are likewise titled Canoe Lake. The print version is a close-up view, the canoe filling the frame horizontally. The canoe, figure and lakeside in the background were printed in black over a wash of orange which fills the sky and lake, conveying a sinister atmosphere. Several other images in the portfolio portray figures in boats on a lake. Night Fishing (P11552) is an even darker image of a lake and canoe, in which the shadowy forms of two people are barely visible. A lighter, but perhaps no less sinister, atmosphere is depicted in Lunker (P11550), in which a dark silhouetted figure stands in a small boat, fishing in a lake.

Canoe Lake is landscape in format. It was made using one etching plate and the techniques of softground, hardground and aquatint.